Debugging

When the pressure is on to resolve an elusive software or hardware glitch, what’s needed is a cool head courtesy of a set of rules guaranteed to work on any system, in any circumstance. Written in a frank but engaging style, this book provides simple, foolproof principles guaranteed to help find any bug quickly. Recognized tech expert and author David Agans changes the way you think about debugging, making those pesky problems suddenly much easier to find and fix. Agans identifies nine simple, practical rules that are applicable to any software application or hardware system, which can help detect any bug, no matter how tricky or obscure. Illustrating the rules with real-life bug-detection war stories, Debugging shows you how to: Understand the system: how perceiving the ""roadmap"" can hasten your journey Quit thinking and look: when hands-on investigation can’t be avoided Isolate critical factors: why changing one element at a time can be an essential tool Keep an audit trail: how keeping a record of the debugging process can win the day Whether the system or program you’re working on has been designed wrong, built wrong, or used wrong, Debugging helps you think correctly about bugs, so the problems virtually reveal themselves.

Debugging is crucial to successful software development, but even many experienced programmers find it challenging. Sophisticated debugging tools are available, yet it may be difficult to determine which features are useful in which situations. The Art of Debugging is your guide to making the debugging process more efficient and effective. The Art of Debugging illustrates the use three of the most popular debugging tools on Linux/Unix platforms: GDB, DDD, and Eclipse. The text-command based GDB (the GNU Project Debugger) is included with most distributions. DDD is a popular GUI front end for GDB, while Eclipse provides a complete integrated development environment. In addition to offering specific advice for debugging with each tool, authors Norm Matloff and Pete Salzman cover general strategies for improving the process of finding and fixing coding errors, including how to: –Inspect variables and data structures –Understand segmentation faults and core dumps –Know why your program crashes or throws exceptions –Use features like catchpoints, convenience variables, and artificial arrays –Avoid common debugging pitfalls Real world examples of coding errors help to clarify the authors’ guiding principles, and coverage of complex topics like thread, client-server, GUI, and parallel programming debugging will make you even more proficient. You'll also learn how to prevent errors in the first place with text editors, compilers, error reporting, and static code checkers. Whether you dread the thought of debugging your programs or simply want to improve your current debugging efforts, you'll find a valuable ally in The Art of Debugging.

Every software developer and IT professional understands the crucial importance of effective debugging. Often, debugging consumes most of a developer’s workday, and mastering the required techniques and skills can take a lifetime. In Effective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis helps experienced programmers accelerate their journey to mastery, by systematically categorizing, explaining, and illustrating the most useful debugging methods, strategies, techniques, and tools. Drawing on more than thirty-five years of experience, Spinellis expands your arsenal of debugging techniques, helping you choose the best approaches for each challenge. He presents vendor-neutral, example-rich advice on general principles, high-level strategies, concrete techniques, high-efficiency tools, creative tricks, and the behavioral traits associated with effective debugging. Spinellis’s 66 expert techniques address every facet of debugging and are illustrated with step-by-step instructions and actual code. He addresses the full spectrum of problems that can arise in modern software systems, especially problems caused by complex interactions among components and services running on hosts scattered around the planet. Whether you’re debugging isolated runtime errors or catastrophic enterprise system failures, this guide will help you get the job done—more quickly, and with less pain. Key features include High-level strategies and methods for addressing diverse software failures Specific techniques to apply when programming, compiling, and running code Better ways to make the most of your debugger General-purpose skills and tools worth investing in Advanced ideas and techniques for escaping dead-ends and the maze of complexity Advice for making programs easier to debug Specialized approaches for debugging multithreaded, asynchronous, and embedded code Bug avoidance through improved software design, construction, and management

The First In-Depth, Real-World, Insider’s Guide to Powerful Windows Debugging For Windows developers, few tasks are more challenging than debugging–-or more crucial. Reliable and realistic information about Windows debugging has always been scarce. Now, with over 15 years of experience two of Microsoft’s system-level developers present a thorough and practical guide to Windows debugging ever written. Mario Hewardt and Daniel Pravat cover debugging throughout the entire application lifecycle and show how to make the most of the tools currently available–-including Microsoft’s powerful native debuggers and third-party solutions. To help you find real solutions fast, this book is organized around real-world debugging scenarios. Hewardt and Pravat use detailed code examples to illuminate the complex debugging challenges professional developers actually face. From core Windows operating system concepts to security, Windows® VistaTM and 64-bit debugging, they address emerging topics head-on–and nothing is ever oversimplified or glossed over!

Use Windows debuggers throughout the development cycle—and build better software Rethink your use of Windows debugging and tracing tools—and learn how to make them a key part of test-driven software development. Led by a member of the Windows Fundamentals Team at Microsoft, you’ll apply expert debugging and tracing techniques—and sharpen your C++ and C# code analysis skills—through practical examples and common scenarios. Learn why experienced developers use debuggers in every step of the development process, and not just when bugs appear. Discover how to: Go behind the scenes to examine how powerful Windows debuggers work Catch bugs early in the development cycle with static and runtime analysis tools Gain practical strategies to tackle the most common code defects Apply expert tricks to handle user-mode and kernel-mode debugging tasks Implement postmortem techniques such as JIT and dump debugging Debug the concurrency and security aspects of your software Use debuggers to analyze interactions between your code and the operating system Analyze software behavior with Xperf and the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) framework

Writing code is only half the battle in developing applications. Getting the bugs out is the other half - and it can be the frustrating part since, after all, bugs don't just mysteriously appear in your code. You have to put them there. But masterful debugging is more than a skill you can learn, it's a frame of mind, yes, almost a way of life. In "Debugging Visual FoxPro Applications", Nancy Folsom takes you into the head of a successful debugger, gives you a new perspective on the mind set, and then explores the myriad of tools that Visual FoxPro programmers have at their disposal.

Debugging has always been a costly part of software development, and many attempts have been made to provide automatic computer support for this task.Automated debugging has seen major develoments over the last decade. Onesuccessful development is algorithmic debugging, which originated in logic programming but was later generalized to concurrent, imperative, and lazy functional languages. Important advances have also been made in knowledge-based program debugging, and in approaches to automated debugging based on static and dynamic program slicing based on dataflow and dependence analysis technology. This is the first collected volume of papers on automated debugging and presents latest developments, tutorial papers, and surveys.

You get huge development advantages with Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003—but you need a new bag of debugging tricks to take full advantage of them in today’s .NET and Win32® development worlds. Learn lethally effective, real-world application debugging techniques for .NET Framework 1.1 and Windows with this fully updated programming guide. Debugging expert John Robbins expands the first edition of his classic debugging book with all-new scenarios and bug-killing tools, tips, and techniques. You’ll see every .NET and Windows debugging scenario here—from XML Web services and Microsoft ASP.NET to Windows services and exceptions. Along with John’s expert guidance, you get more than 6 MB of his battle-tested source code—for the tools and tactics you need to ship better software faster! Topics covered include: Where bugs come from and how to think about solving them Debugging during coding Operating system debugging support and how Win32 debuggers work Advanced debugger usage and .NET debugging with Visual Studio .NET Advanced native code techniques with Visual Studio .NET and WinDBG Extending the Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment Managed exception monitoring Flow tracing and performance Finding source and line information with just a crash address Crash handlers Debugging Windows services and DLLs that load into services Multithreaded deadlocks Automated testing The Debug C run-time library A high-performance tracing tool for server applications Smoothing the working set Appendixes: Reading Dr. Watson log files, plus resources for .NET and Windows developers CD-ROM features: 6+ MB of professional-level source code samples written in Microsoft Visual C++®, Visual C#®, and Visual Basic® .NET Debugging Tools for Windows Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SDK Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) A Note Regarding the CD or DVD The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to [email protected].